I'm the founder of Prisonology.com, which is a web-based product to help defendants prepare for prison. I hope you never need it! I write on white-collar crime and try to provide a different perspective than that of the mainstream media. I co-authored "Stolen Without A Gun" with Neil Weinberg, former Executive Editor Forbes Magazine (now a Reporter for Bloomberg). On a good day, I'll be talking with some bright defense lawyers or writing for Forbes.

Former BP Engineer Kurt Mix Lays Out Defense At Trial

Some may think that former BPBP engineer Kurt Mix had looked forward to Monday, the opportunity at trial to clear his name from obstruction of justice charges levied against him by the U.S. government. To the contrary, Mix has sought every opportunity to avoid being in a New Orleans federal courtroom since his arrest in April 2012. His reasoning has been simple, he believes he did nothing wrong.

Mix, like it or not, is the current face of the BP oil spill from the Macondo well that began on April 20, 2010 and leaked (gushed) oil into the Gulf of Mexico for over 90 days. Mix had nothing to do with designing the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, nor was he responsible for any of the operations that led up to the explosion on the rig, killing 11 hardworking men and injuring many others. However, the prosecution of Kurt Mix has come to symbolize the U.S. government’s attempt at holding an individual, not a company, accountable for the spill. Since throwing people in prison has become the modern day equivalent of a public hanging, the government is seeking to make an example of the engineer whose task it was to stop the oil from spilling. His crime? Deleting text messages from his iPhone.

Once BP sprung into action to stop the spill, it issued a “Hold Notice” which was a notification to everyone involved to retain all information (Post It Notes, note pads, emails, texts, voicemails, etc.) that the employee “reasonably believes to be relevant to the Macondo incident.” Mix deleted text messages, a fact that his attorney Joan McPhee acknowledged in her opening statement yesterday. The government calls the act “Obstruction of Justice,” a crime that could put Mix in prison for years. The jury will have to decide if the act was meant to obstruct justice or just Mix deleting text messages that were, in his opinion, not relevant.

The government presented in its opening statement that Mix deleted three text strings, a series of text messages sent to a specific person. Those strings, in the government’s opinion, were an act to obstruct justice related to the flow of oil from the Macondo well during the spill, something that Mix played an integral role in calculating. That flow rate would be used initially to develop a solution to stopping the spill then, later, would be used in determining the amount of oil spilled. Earlier this year, BP and the government agreed that the fine for the amount of oil spilled was $4 billion.

To prove that Mix purposely deleted those message strings to hinder anything seems like a long shot. First, one of the three text message strings Mix deleted, from his personal iPhone, was between he and his sister, who had nothing to do with the operation. I would say that is not relevant and should not have even made it into the prosecution’s opening statement … but it did.

Second, the next message string deleted was with Mix and Wilson Arabie, who is expected to testify. Wilson was a long time friend of Mix’s and was a contractor to BP tasked with an administration role, totally unrelated to engineering calculations, flow rate, or anything related to stopping the oil spill. In fact, Arabie is not even an petroleum engineer … he’s not any type of engineer and none of his communications with Mix were technical in nature. McPhee and her defense team discovered in April 2013, over a year after Mix’s arrest, that the FBI and prosecutors had withheld notes from an interview with Arabie that their text exchanges were just friendly banter. All 182 text entries that were deleted have since been recovered, McPhee even held up a copy of them in court. She encouraged the jurors to “… read them, each and every one of them.” My guess is that those would be a boring read.

Third, the text message string deleted between John Sprague and Mix were stated by the government as being between “Mix and his supervisor.” The truth is, Mix and Sprague were also good friends for over 10 years and the deletion of the text string, like the others, were of a personal nature. In fact, the act of deleting the text string occurred when Sprague sent a photo of Mix working away at his desk … a few feet away. Mix saw the photo, laughed and deleted it … along with the string of texts the two had exchanged from months before.

Fourth, there is no evidence that Mix attempted to obstruct his alleged obstruction. All three of the recipients were never contacted by Mix to assure that they too deleted the message string. In fact, Mix never even notified any of them that he had deleted the innocuous messages.

Fifth, Mix provided thousands of documents to BP that resulted from his work on the Macondo well. McPhee told the jury in her opening statement that Mix gave BP nearly 10,000 electronic and paper documents associated with his work. ” … the very, very best evidence of not hiding, is giving,” she said to the jury.

So how did Mix’s case make it all the way to federal court. A federal grand jury was told that Mix worked on the project, was a key engineer in determining the flow of oil from the well and deleted texts associated with his work on the well when he was told not to. One may ask, “ Didn’t the grand jury see the text messages in question?” The answer to that is “NO“, again, something else prosecutors knew but McPhee only discovered a year after Mix’s arrest. That type of information is also something the current jury will never hear … but this jury will see the message contents.

Mix did leave a trail of evidence of his work and, more importantly, his state of mind as he undertook his task to stop the oil spill. A avid duck hunter and sport fisherman who grew up in New Roads, LA, Mix understood what was at stake when he went to work. When he first got on the job for BP he wrote down reflections, his goals, on the work ahead … here are a few:

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